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In my opinion, vBulletin is by far the best forum software, but it can create some problems for your website.

Most sites work very hard on creating good quality content, but once they add a forum the site will attract a lot of user-generated content and low value pages.

The first thing you need to do is make sure that your directory indexes are set in your htaccess file. This means that yoursite.com/forum will redirect to yoursite.com/forum/index.php, rather than just showing a page with a list of all the files. Make sure you do this for every single directory in your site.

Secondly, you should use robots.txt to remove all the low quality pages. Here is the file you need to use:

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Comments
4

a robots.txt file to remove all low quality pages is always a good thing whether it be for a forum or for a blog, or whatever the CMS.

But I wasn't too sure about your .htaccess tip. Most LAMP setups will already show index.php as the default file when the directory is accessed. If you were using /dir/landingpage.php as the only HTML file in the directory, then sure, .htaccess would work in this case. But I don't feel it is necessary when an index.php file is existing. If you get a directory list when an index.php file exists, then you should be tweaking your apache config for the server instead of playing with .htaccess.